Sexy hands of wonder

Errr, did you say "Ix's top off"?
Totally off?
I'm asking for a friend.

Well, the next comic is coming on and by THUNDER it's fantastic fun, this one. It has taken 55 pages just to get Ix's top off.

FIFTY FIVE! Yes I'm taking my bloody time.

So let's go off on a tangent and talk about hands. I know, it's a normal day at work and then someone comes up to you and creeps over your cute hands and/or hand posture.

Typical. Classic.

If I had a penny for every time ... only most of the time it's me being the hand-based perve. Not that I have a hand fetish you understand (heck if I had one it'd be obvious in the comics; no secrets there), it's just that hands can be so awesome and I'm only really just now consciously thinking about it.

It seems (looking back), I've always paid careful attention to what the hands of the characters in my comics do. This sounds stupid, but without poise the whole reality breaks down. And if the reality breaks down then there's no point trying to make it look sexy because it won't be.

In this image, Tom's hands are
expressing the emotion 'can't be arsed'

I could do some examples, where someone's finger angles look unnatural vs same pic with their hands expressing something, but remember I'm pretty lazy and so I can't be bothered.

Just close your eyes and imagine I've done that, and proved my point. See what I mean? Exactly. Glad we all agree.

Anyway, back to the comic - think we're going to be well over 100 pages again by the time I'm done. And yeah taking 55 pages just to get Ix naked means I'm going slow (I mean, all the others have been naked by page 20 or something, but Ix is the key one here), but the build-up just adds to the believability / sexiness I think. In fact I know; I had to stop at page 58 for the fapping to begin, and that's always a good sign - fapable content. Urgently fapable content, even better :)

Sorry, rude topic.

Means it takes a bit longer to complete the comic, but I'm sure you guys don't mind waiting, huh?

Free comic, can't complain :D

Rendering...

Beep beep. Pretty bored at work today, thought I'd move the comic on a little. Got some headway, played around a bit, made some nice things.

Truth is I love this process. It's such fun moving these CG characters around the 3D space, tweaking their thumbs and eyeballs and every body part, making sure it seems human, getting the riiiiight camera angle.

Maybe it's a control thing. Heck if it is, who cares, control is fun.

Even the pre-render clay subsurface calculation is fun - look at the picture below - the computer has to figure out how light is going to bounce beneath skin, so it renders just the skin and figures that out with the shadows from the clothes first. It's like a weird voyeuristic preview, giving you a vague idea how the scene's going to pan out.

Slightly strange one here in that Xho doesn't have a penis (it's hidden for this shot cos he has shorts on), but trust me, it'll come into play at some point. Oooh yes. Yes indeed.

Hey-ho pip and dandy.

 

This next comic though. It's going to be good. Goooooooood.

Brainwave mode

I've been reading a really interesting book on loop quantum gravity and (whilst extruding my brain into bow-tie shaped vol-au-vents), hit upon an epic plot twist for the comic. Yay physics! Yay geometry and movement vectors integrating with perceived time!

I was also busy working on some good old-fashioned angst between Tom and Becky, when it struck me Tom hasn't been much more than the butt of the joke for about 10 comics. Poor chap. So this epic (and it is a corker) plot twist will bring our dear Tom back into the spotlight, back into the protagonist camp once more. No Ix isn't going to secretly have been a baddie all this time, they're all still good don't worry I'm not that evil.

Not wanting to give too much away, but I chose that pic of Ix holding her tshirt up like that because it (1) rather nicely depicts the infinite spherical loop quantum effects I'll be exploring in comic 20, assuming her cleavage and top are graphs for spacetime and (2) is a nice picture with boobies. 

My two great loves, there; norks and theorems. 

"...and if we take the bottom as dY, the path vectors accelerate towards the event horizon, dZ with respect to the original path described by the boobies. Even on the planck scale, spacetime ..."

Ah, astrophysics lectures would have been SO much more pay-attention-to-able.

Comic agenda

This is a lighting test. It failed.

So like let's talk about the comics, because comics are cool. And let's talk about psychology because that's also cool.

When I started them with comic #1, I was excited about the fact that I could basically put the digital Ken and Barbie dolls together and hit the render button and hey presto! A picture like I could never draw! Awesome!

So putting the comics together in the early days, I literally put no thought into the plot or the attitude of the characters. It was just "What basic premise can I use to get these dolls out of their clothes and basically inserted into each other?". Good place to start.

Looking back at the first few (5?) comics I did, it's actually pretty cringey - not because of the poor rendering nor the stuttering scripts, but the pretty bad way they treat each other! Like in The Spymaster, when Tom gets Zan out of hypersleep and just bends her over and has sex with her?! WTF! The real, real, genuine reason I put that in the comic is because I actually genuinely couldn't be bothered to render the whole thing where he explains everything to her, and it was just quicker to just have them have sex right there. Stupid, craziness. I figured it's nothing like real life, and as far as character consistency was concerned, maybe Zan would forgive Tom because he was cool about protecting her from a rape scenario at the beginning of Comic #3 - remember Tom is offered sex with Zan in return for ship supplies. His honourable reply explains why they get on so well with sex afterwards, and why Zan forgives him later - she knows he's good and his confidence is generally in his ethics.

Anyway, rendering-wise, it was laziness. But who cares, it's a comic, it doesn't matter.

Then I got as far as Breakfast in Tacspace, and I guess I started caring about the characters a bit more - caring what they said and how that affected each other.

Which made me start thinking about what matters to me, what was the big deal about why I wanted to escape into creating a comic in the first place? What was I really trying to tell the story of? The whole reason I put a 'rape' scene in Dive into the Dark, after that, was that I wanted to make a comment about control in sex. Get the ball rolling. Big fucking ball, roll it slow. Take 20 comics to explain it, fine.

And now we get to the point. I've mentioned subservience before on this blog, years ago; it's an interesting topic which gained a few interesting comments at the time. I get that people really get into tying up / control within a relationship, within sex play, that's something I kinda get like I get that it's fun to dress up as doctors and nurses and be naughty. All good fun.

I also understand that some people actually like being treated like shit in their relationship all the time  - though I do find that a bit sad if it's ALL the time, that seems more like serious psyche probs to me. I've had a few friends who've been drawn to abusive partners. I say a few, I had one. And that seemed to be because her parents were abusive and there was a whole trauma / abuse problem there re-occuring throughout her life. Not a happy bunny. Also pretty unusual. Not unusual to be abused, unusual to get a kick out of it.

So here's the point: how come there's so much subservience / control / abuse in porn? The propagation of abuse stuff in particular on porn sites is a bit worrying. Just look at the front page of Xvideos. Guys grabbing girls throats, calling them bitches, treating them like dirt. Like the male porn stars are the ethics police or something?

Is it the growth of the entitlement thing? Do young men really think they either claim (1) what's 'theirs', or (2) they earn it? That those are the only two options? Be a heck of a shame if that was the case, because both are bloody wrong. Is it because there's been so much divorce in America in the 80s/90s, and now we're seeing the cultural repercussions in the form of bad father-to-son modelling of behaviour? Those fatherless guys have grown up and are affecting the porn industry. Oh great. More prejudice against women. Wonderful.

*golf clap*

(Yes I know my thing is incest, and yes that might make me a massive hypocrite, but the difference with my particular bias is it's even-stevens, both parties get into it, and the other thing is there's only like 2% of stuff in porn is incest - it's nowhere near as mainstream as specific abuse of the female. If incest was prevailing so much I'd probably be equally concerned. I mean heck it'd be great if it was everywhere and it was sexy and well acted, but it'd still be a weird trend in terms of cultural psychology, right?)

So comic #19 will open with a discussion between Tom and Becky and I hope it kinda lays the ground for me to make a point in my comics. It's something I've been working towards (along with finding out about Ix's past), a bit of a discussion on misogyny and control.

Long-term readers of my blog will know I've always sorta thought of the different characters in my comics as different fragments of my own psyche. So when Tom's overconfident and full of shit in They Came in Outer Space - Ix lays him out. That's the part of me that wishes I could just end the conversation when a guy is unbelievably cocky. It's also the part of me that says stupid things and wishes I could take them back!

Or in the same comic when he says he doesn't want the alien girls, he just wants Becky - that's the part of me that wakes up and realises I'm in love. When Xho wants to do the right thing but keeps thinking about the wrong thing - that's me, right there. When Zan just wants everyone to get along, when Luce doesn't explain anything but remains a mystery, when Hayley just wants to cram things into her and experiment, when Becky's daydreaming or feeling cross - it's become ways to talk about my own feelings as opposed to just trying to produce a comic. I guess that's my secret. That, and not taking myself too seriously. So the next comic will include angry conversations about misogyny, and more incest than ever before.

 Plus tits.

And dicks.

And bottoms.

Haha, bottoms. Gotta love em.

Test render #2: "Uhh hi guys, I wondered if any of you knew why half my clothes are buried in my skin and I seem to have developed alopecia?"... this is why we do test renders ...